The NY Times has an interesting piece on the internet, the censorship it faces and the role of Google in all of this - given its domination of the web in so many ways:
"Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.
The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet."
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House
Probably all decent law-abiding and intelligent people are on countdown to seeing George W exit the White House. His 8 years in the Oval Office have been a disaster not only for the US but for the world. It is hard to think of one positive thing George Shrub accomplished whilst in office.
"The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players."
Vanity Fair "packages" the last 8 years into a retrospective analysis - here.
"The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players."
Vanity Fair "packages" the last 8 years into a retrospective analysis - here.
Giving the lie to the Israelis
Israel claims that it doesn't target civilians - only Hamas terrorists / people.
It's a lie of course! -
Lie #1:
This heart-rending piece from The Guardian [reproduced by the SMH] shows all too clearly the result of Israel's actions:
"Sixteen year old Iman Balousha didn't hear the explosion that destroyed the bedroom she shared with her six sisters. "I was asleep," she said. "I just woke when the bricks fell on me. I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn't move … I started to scream and told my sisters we would die. We all screamed: 'Baba, Mama. Come to help us.' "
The Baloushas, a family of 11, lived in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza near the camp's Imad Aqil mosque. The blast that destroyed the mosque on Sunday also brought down the family's house.
The seven eldest girls, asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom, bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 14, Samar, 13, Dina, eight, and Jawaher, four.
Buried in the rubble, Iman recognised her uncle's voice among the rescuers and shouted for help. "He found me and started to remove the bricks and the rubble from me. They started to pull me by my hands - the bricks were still lying on my legs."
Her mother, Samira, 36, saw the pile of bricks in the girls' bedroom and was stricken with grief, convinced they were all dead. She, too, was asleep when the bomb struck. "I opened my eyes and saw bricks all over my body," she said. "My face was covered with the concrete blocks."
She sat on a sofa surrounded by other women at a neighbour's house further along the street and struggled to speak. Her husband, Anwar, 40, sat in another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his hands. He spoke bitterly of his daughters' deaths. "We are civilians. I don't belong to any faction; I don't support Fatah or Hamas. I'm just a Palestinian."
Lie #2:
"There's no such thing as a 'humanitarian cease-fire'," an Olmert aide said Tuesday. "Gaza is not undergoing a humanitarian crisis. We're constantly supplying it with food and medications, and there's no need for a humanitarian cease-fire."
As reported by Haaretz.
It's a lie of course! -
Lie #1:
This heart-rending piece from The Guardian [reproduced by the SMH] shows all too clearly the result of Israel's actions:
"Sixteen year old Iman Balousha didn't hear the explosion that destroyed the bedroom she shared with her six sisters. "I was asleep," she said. "I just woke when the bricks fell on me. I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn't move … I started to scream and told my sisters we would die. We all screamed: 'Baba, Mama. Come to help us.' "
The Baloushas, a family of 11, lived in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza near the camp's Imad Aqil mosque. The blast that destroyed the mosque on Sunday also brought down the family's house.
The seven eldest girls, asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom, bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 14, Samar, 13, Dina, eight, and Jawaher, four.
Buried in the rubble, Iman recognised her uncle's voice among the rescuers and shouted for help. "He found me and started to remove the bricks and the rubble from me. They started to pull me by my hands - the bricks were still lying on my legs."
Her mother, Samira, 36, saw the pile of bricks in the girls' bedroom and was stricken with grief, convinced they were all dead. She, too, was asleep when the bomb struck. "I opened my eyes and saw bricks all over my body," she said. "My face was covered with the concrete blocks."
She sat on a sofa surrounded by other women at a neighbour's house further along the street and struggled to speak. Her husband, Anwar, 40, sat in another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his hands. He spoke bitterly of his daughters' deaths. "We are civilians. I don't belong to any faction; I don't support Fatah or Hamas. I'm just a Palestinian."
Lie #2:
"There's no such thing as a 'humanitarian cease-fire'," an Olmert aide said Tuesday. "Gaza is not undergoing a humanitarian crisis. We're constantly supplying it with food and medications, and there's no need for a humanitarian cease-fire."
As reported by Haaretz.
Robert Fisk: Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored
What is there left to say about the carnage being perpetrated by the Israelis in Gaza? The world tut-tuts and the major politicians blame the Palestinians and Gazans for the violance. Israel says its attack is directed against Hamas and not civilians. Then, why did the Israeli navy intercept a vessel carrying medical supplies headed for Gaza?
Robert Fisk, expert in and on the region for over 30 years now, puts things into context in his latest piece for The Independent yesterday "Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored":
"We've got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don't care any more – providing we don't offend the Israelis. It's not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel's side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.
Ever since 1948, we've been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist "death wagon" will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be "liberated". And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise "restraint" – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas's home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.
The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel's anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas's anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was "under siege" – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv."
Robert Fisk, expert in and on the region for over 30 years now, puts things into context in his latest piece for The Independent yesterday "Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored":
"We've got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don't care any more – providing we don't offend the Israelis. It's not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel's side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.
Ever since 1948, we've been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist "death wagon" will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be "liberated". And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise "restraint" – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas's home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.
The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel's anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas's anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was "under siege" – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv."
Q and A with Lakhdar Brahimi: What Next for Gaza?
Lakhdar Brahimi, a leading United Nations troubleshooter in the Middle East, who also presided over the Bonn conference in 2001 that created the post-Taliban government of Afghanistan, is a former Algerian foreign minister who has tracked the growth of Islamic militancy across North Africa and in the wider Muslim world. In an interview with The Nation, Brahimi talks about the potentially dangerous fallout in the Mideast and beyond of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, and the burden it puts on president-elect Obama as he tries to improve the image of the United States.
Read the Q & A on The Nation here.
Read the Q & A on The Nation here.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Responses to the Israeli bullyboy
Some responses to the violent ongoing attacks by the Israelis on Gaza - from op-ed writers in Haaretz:
First, Tom Segev in "Trying to 'teach Hamas a lesson' is fundamentally wrong":
".....the assault on Gaza does not first and foremost demand moral condemnation - it demands a few historical reminders. Both the justification given for it and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another.
Israel is striking at the Palestinians to "teach them a lesson." That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom - via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.
The bombing of Gaza is also supposed to "liquidate the Hamas regime," in line with another assumption that has accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception: that it is possible to impose a "moderate" leadership on the Palestinians, one that will abandon their national aspirations.
As a corollary, Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over."
Next, Gideon Levy in "The neighborhood bully strikes again":
"Once again, Israel's violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.
What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. History's bitter irony: A government that went to a futile war two months after its establishment - today nearly everyone acknowledges as much - embarks on another doomed war two months before the end of its term."
Finally, Amira Hass in "Gaza strike is not against Hamas, it's against all Palestinians"
First, Tom Segev in "Trying to 'teach Hamas a lesson' is fundamentally wrong":
".....the assault on Gaza does not first and foremost demand moral condemnation - it demands a few historical reminders. Both the justification given for it and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another.
Israel is striking at the Palestinians to "teach them a lesson." That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom - via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.
The bombing of Gaza is also supposed to "liquidate the Hamas regime," in line with another assumption that has accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception: that it is possible to impose a "moderate" leadership on the Palestinians, one that will abandon their national aspirations.
As a corollary, Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over."
Next, Gideon Levy in "The neighborhood bully strikes again":
"Once again, Israel's violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.
What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. History's bitter irony: A government that went to a futile war two months after its establishment - today nearly everyone acknowledges as much - embarks on another doomed war two months before the end of its term."
Finally, Amira Hass in "Gaza strike is not against Hamas, it's against all Palestinians"
Bargain books have an unexpected cost
There are odd things happening in the world of books, readership and bookshops. People are seemingly reading books more than ever despite dire predictions about the demise of reading with the advent of TV, DVD's, Amazon etc. etc. Yet publishing houses plan on cutting the number of books to be published and even more troubling bookstores - some venerable and revered - are closing their doors.
So, what is happening? One insight into the problem is discussed in an article "Bargain books have an unexpected cost" in the IHT:
"U.S. book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding - even more than usual for an industry that has been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it would not acquire any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.
American bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well.
Olsson's, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robin's, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powell's, the huge store in Portland, Oregon, said sales were so weak that it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.
Do not blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader's time or diminished attention spans. What is undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers."
So, what is happening? One insight into the problem is discussed in an article "Bargain books have an unexpected cost" in the IHT:
"U.S. book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding - even more than usual for an industry that has been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it would not acquire any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.
American bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well.
Olsson's, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robin's, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powell's, the huge store in Portland, Oregon, said sales were so weak that it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.
Do not blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader's time or diminished attention spans. What is undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers."
Monday, December 29, 2008
Robert Fisk: Who Believes There Is ‘Progress’ in the Middle East?
Veteran journalist, writer and commentator Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent [republished on truthdig.com] on the latest attacks by Israelis on Gaza and where president-elect Obama fits into the scheme of things:
"If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point.
Let’s kick off with the man who is not going to change the Middle East, Barack Obama, who last week, with infinite predictability, became Time’s “person of the year”. But buried in a long and immensely tedious interview inside the magazine, Obama devotes just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that’s been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority.”
What is this man talking about? “Building on progress?” What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel’s monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there’s “progress” to build on?"
"If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point.
Let’s kick off with the man who is not going to change the Middle East, Barack Obama, who last week, with infinite predictability, became Time’s “person of the year”. But buried in a long and immensely tedious interview inside the magazine, Obama devotes just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that’s been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority.”
What is this man talking about? “Building on progress?” What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel’s monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there’s “progress” to build on?"
Year of the hungry: 1,000,000,000 afflicted
Things don't get better in the world we live in. We might be making all sorts of strides in medicine and technology, but the simple act of being able to feed all the peoples on this planet of ours remains elusive.
The Independent reports on this shocking news "Year of the hungry: 1,000,000,000 afflicted" as we are about to start 2009:
"One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history, as the international financial crisis deepens, the United Nations has told The Independent on Sunday.
The shocking landmark will be passed – despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row – because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced.
Decades of progress in reducing hunger are being abruptly reversed, dealing a devastating blow to a pledge by world leaders eight years ago to cut it in half by 2015.
Rich countries have failed to provide promised money to boost agriculture in the Third World; the financial crisis is starving developing countries of credit and driving their people into greater poverty, and food aid to the starving is expected to begin drying up next month."
The Independent reports on this shocking news "Year of the hungry: 1,000,000,000 afflicted" as we are about to start 2009:
"One billion people will go hungry around the globe next year for the first time in human history, as the international financial crisis deepens, the United Nations has told The Independent on Sunday.
The shocking landmark will be passed – despite a second record worldwide harvest in a row – because people are becoming too destitute to buy the food that is produced.
Decades of progress in reducing hunger are being abruptly reversed, dealing a devastating blow to a pledge by world leaders eight years ago to cut it in half by 2015.
Rich countries have failed to provide promised money to boost agriculture in the Third World; the financial crisis is starving developing countries of credit and driving their people into greater poverty, and food aid to the starving is expected to begin drying up next month."
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Real people under all that bombing
Israel doesn't care - let's not even reflect on the Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention! - nor the rest of the world [witness the one-sided and sickening condemnations of Hamas and nary a peep about Israel's actions] but there are bombs raining down on real people in Gaza in no way involved in firing rockets into Israel or doing anything to harm Israelis.
An eye-witness account from a reliable source:
"I’ve never seen anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I’m in the middle of it and a few hours have already passed. I think 15 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza. The images are probably not broadcast in US media. There are piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you look at them you can see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they’re all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the universities) a bomb fell on a large group of young men, university students, they’d been warned not to stand in groups, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. This was about 3 hours ago. 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbours kids, teenagers who were from the same family (Rayes) and were best friends. As I’m writing this I heard a funeral procession go by outside, I looked out the window and it was the 3 Rayes boys. They spent all their time together when they were alive, and now their sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14 year old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn’t spoken a word since.
A little further down the street about an hour earlier 3 girls happened to be passing by one of the locations when a bomb fell. The girls bodies were torn into pieces and covered the street from one side to the other.
These are just a couple of images that I’ve witnessed. In all the locations people are going through the dead terrified of recognizing a family member among them. The city is in a state of alarm, panic and confusion, cell phones aren’t working, hospitals and morgues are backed up and some of the dead are still lying in the streets with their families gathered around them, kissing their faces, holding on to them. Outside the destroyed buildings old men are kneeling on the floor weeping. Their slim hopes of finding their sons still alive vanished after taking one look at what had become of their office buildings.
160 people dead in today’s air raid. That means 160 funeral processions, a few today, most of them tomorrow probably. To think that yesterday these families were worried about food and heat and electricity. At this point I think they -actually all of us- would gladly have Hamas sign off every last basic right we’ve been calling for the last few months forever if it could have stopped this from ever having happened.
The bombing was very close to my home. Most of my extended family live in the area. My family is ok, but 2 of my uncles’ homes were damaged, another relative was injured.
I don’t know why I’m sending this email. It doesn’t even begin to tell the story on any level. Just flashes of thing that happened today that are going through my head."
An eye-witness account from a reliable source:
"I’ve never seen anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I’m in the middle of it and a few hours have already passed. I think 15 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza. The images are probably not broadcast in US media. There are piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you look at them you can see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they’re all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the universities) a bomb fell on a large group of young men, university students, they’d been warned not to stand in groups, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. This was about 3 hours ago. 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbours kids, teenagers who were from the same family (Rayes) and were best friends. As I’m writing this I heard a funeral procession go by outside, I looked out the window and it was the 3 Rayes boys. They spent all their time together when they were alive, and now their sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14 year old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn’t spoken a word since.
A little further down the street about an hour earlier 3 girls happened to be passing by one of the locations when a bomb fell. The girls bodies were torn into pieces and covered the street from one side to the other.
These are just a couple of images that I’ve witnessed. In all the locations people are going through the dead terrified of recognizing a family member among them. The city is in a state of alarm, panic and confusion, cell phones aren’t working, hospitals and morgues are backed up and some of the dead are still lying in the streets with their families gathered around them, kissing their faces, holding on to them. Outside the destroyed buildings old men are kneeling on the floor weeping. Their slim hopes of finding their sons still alive vanished after taking one look at what had become of their office buildings.
160 people dead in today’s air raid. That means 160 funeral processions, a few today, most of them tomorrow probably. To think that yesterday these families were worried about food and heat and electricity. At this point I think they -actually all of us- would gladly have Hamas sign off every last basic right we’ve been calling for the last few months forever if it could have stopped this from ever having happened.
The bombing was very close to my home. Most of my extended family live in the area. My family is ok, but 2 of my uncles’ homes were damaged, another relative was injured.
I don’t know why I’m sending this email. It doesn’t even begin to tell the story on any level. Just flashes of thing that happened today that are going through my head."
Vale Harold Pinter. Is our Conscience Dead?
Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."
Writing on CommonDreams she pays tribute - no, homage! - to Harold Pinter, who died the other day:
"On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptable speech. I was in London in December, 2005 speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech-not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.
I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Noble Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight onto the tragic effects of the past decades of U.S. foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.
Pinter's Laureate speech question "Is Our Conscience Dead" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or as in Cheney's case, purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable."
Continue reading the piece here - including the Pinter speech.
Writing on CommonDreams she pays tribute - no, homage! - to Harold Pinter, who died the other day:
"On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptable speech. I was in London in December, 2005 speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech-not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.
I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Noble Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight onto the tragic effects of the past decades of U.S. foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.
Pinter's Laureate speech question "Is Our Conscience Dead" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or as in Cheney's case, purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable."
Continue reading the piece here - including the Pinter speech.
Cheney: Lawbreaker, liar and fool!
A NY Times editorial "The World According to Cheney" has a timely appraisal of VP Cheney - who has recently been engaged in so-called exit talks clearly re-writing history:
"Vice President Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: They should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans. After all, he said, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did worse than that.
So Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush managed to stop short of repeating two of the most outrageous abuses of power in American history — Roosevelt’s decision to force Japanese-Americans into camps and Lincoln’s declaration of martial law to silence his critics? That’s not exactly a lofty standard of behavior.
Then again, it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews where he has made those comments. It seems as if everything went just great in the Bush years."
In "Cheney’s Legacy of Deception" Robert Scheer, writing for truthdig.com addresses the same issue of Cheney:
"In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of evil incarnate—nearly a quarter of those polled in this week’s CNN poll rated him the worst vice president in U.S. history, and 41 percent as “poor”—Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all.
And why not? Nothing, not his suspect role in the Enron debacle, which foretold the economic meltdown, or his office’s fabrication of the false reasons for invading Iraq, has ever been seriously investigated, because of White House stonewalling. Nor will the new president, committed as he is to nonpartisanship, be likely to open up Cheney’s can of worms."
"Vice President Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: They should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans. After all, he said, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did worse than that.
So Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush managed to stop short of repeating two of the most outrageous abuses of power in American history — Roosevelt’s decision to force Japanese-Americans into camps and Lincoln’s declaration of martial law to silence his critics? That’s not exactly a lofty standard of behavior.
Then again, it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews where he has made those comments. It seems as if everything went just great in the Bush years."
In "Cheney’s Legacy of Deception" Robert Scheer, writing for truthdig.com addresses the same issue of Cheney:
"In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of evil incarnate—nearly a quarter of those polled in this week’s CNN poll rated him the worst vice president in U.S. history, and 41 percent as “poor”—Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all.
And why not? Nothing, not his suspect role in the Enron debacle, which foretold the economic meltdown, or his office’s fabrication of the false reasons for invading Iraq, has ever been seriously investigated, because of White House stonewalling. Nor will the new president, committed as he is to nonpartisanship, be likely to open up Cheney’s can of worms."
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Hunger before the Storm
This piece from Electronic Intifada tells it all - and requires no elaboration or comment, other than what is happening here in totally and utterly unconscionable:
"Israeli politicians, in the run-up to elections, are promising to deal a severe blow to Gaza as this is how Israeli policy is made. However, every household in Gaza is already under siege. In Gaza you can only find pale, angry and frustrated faces. If you visit my house you won't find power, while my neighbor is out of gas. Another neighbor seeks potable water as power outages have left him without for four days. A third neighbor desparately looks for milk for his child but does so in vain. Another friend who lives on the corner needs medicine that can't currently be found in Gaza."
Continue reading here.
"Israeli politicians, in the run-up to elections, are promising to deal a severe blow to Gaza as this is how Israeli policy is made. However, every household in Gaza is already under siege. In Gaza you can only find pale, angry and frustrated faces. If you visit my house you won't find power, while my neighbor is out of gas. Another neighbor seeks potable water as power outages have left him without for four days. A third neighbor desparately looks for milk for his child but does so in vain. Another friend who lives on the corner needs medicine that can't currently be found in Gaza."
Continue reading here.
Top Ten Myths about Iraq, 2008
If one were to believe the media things are on the up in Iraq. Troops are being withdrawn, the Iraqs are doing things for and by themselves, etc. etc.
Professor Juan Cole, veteran commentator and Middle East expert begs to differ in a piece "Top Ten Myths about Iraq, 2008" on his blog Informed Comment.
The first of the 10:
"1. Iraqis are safer because of Bush's War. In fact, conditions of insecurity have helped created both an internal and external refugee problem:
' At least 4.2 million Iraqis were displaced. These included 2.2 million who were displaced within Iraq and some 2 million refugees, mostly in Syria (around 1.4 million) and Jordan (around half a million). In the last months of the year both these neighbouring states, struggling to meet the health, education and other needs of the Iraqi refugees already present, introduced visa requirements that impeded the entry of Iraqis seeking refuge. Within Iraq, most governorates barred entry to Iraqis fleeing sectarian violence elsewhere.'
The following 9 can be read here.
Professor Juan Cole, veteran commentator and Middle East expert begs to differ in a piece "Top Ten Myths about Iraq, 2008" on his blog Informed Comment.
The first of the 10:
"1. Iraqis are safer because of Bush's War. In fact, conditions of insecurity have helped created both an internal and external refugee problem:
' At least 4.2 million Iraqis were displaced. These included 2.2 million who were displaced within Iraq and some 2 million refugees, mostly in Syria (around 1.4 million) and Jordan (around half a million). In the last months of the year both these neighbouring states, struggling to meet the health, education and other needs of the Iraqi refugees already present, introduced visa requirements that impeded the entry of Iraqis seeking refuge. Within Iraq, most governorates barred entry to Iraqis fleeing sectarian violence elsewhere.'
The following 9 can be read here.
Friday, December 26, 2008
So where does this bit go? Oh bugger it!
Who cannot empathise with the travails of buying a present for a child only to find that putting it all together to work, borders on the well-nigh impossible. Or that piece of technical equipment which defies logic in getting it going - or requires hours plowing through some sort of manual or instructions?
One can imagine many fathers around the world today being confronted by their children wanting their Xmas gift to actually work.
So, whether in Australia - where this piece was published in The Age - or elsewhere, Geoff Strong's piece "So where does this bit go? Oh bugger it!" will strike a responsive chord:
"We are easily seduced by choice and manufacturers know it. We might never work out how to use the damn thing but at least we buy it, and that means end of problem for manufacturer. Even better if we break it, because the warranty is probably void if we haven't understood the book."
And:
"Instruction books often sound like they are written by engineers, because they probably are. We expect to be entertained, just being informed is not enough.
Some instructions are just simply badly written, some infuriating, others so bad they are comical.
Take the Chinglish instructions for assembling an exercise bike that could be construed as faintly pornographic: "Please inserting the shaft into the orifice of the main body."
Coincidentally at the IHT there is a piece in similar vein "Need tech help? Look online" - but with a way of getting around a technical problem by going on line:
"This week, I bought a shiny new BlackBerry. This made me very happy. Then I went home and found that my new BlackBerry was inundating my in-box with copies of my sent e-mail messages. This made me very frustrated.
I headed back to the store, where a well-intentioned "specialist" took my phone, tweaked a few settings and said my e-mail messages would be duplicate-free. They weren't.
If you're like me, odds are that you've also found yourself with a tech problem that was made worse by the lack of ready, available - and perhaps most important - helpful help. But with the Internet, there's no need to pine for better support.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other users out there, sharing their experience and wisdom, often for free. So instead of getting on the phone, get online and start crowd-sourcing your tech support needs."
One can imagine many fathers around the world today being confronted by their children wanting their Xmas gift to actually work.
So, whether in Australia - where this piece was published in The Age - or elsewhere, Geoff Strong's piece "So where does this bit go? Oh bugger it!" will strike a responsive chord:
"We are easily seduced by choice and manufacturers know it. We might never work out how to use the damn thing but at least we buy it, and that means end of problem for manufacturer. Even better if we break it, because the warranty is probably void if we haven't understood the book."
And:
"Instruction books often sound like they are written by engineers, because they probably are. We expect to be entertained, just being informed is not enough.
Some instructions are just simply badly written, some infuriating, others so bad they are comical.
Take the Chinglish instructions for assembling an exercise bike that could be construed as faintly pornographic: "Please inserting the shaft into the orifice of the main body."
Coincidentally at the IHT there is a piece in similar vein "Need tech help? Look online" - but with a way of getting around a technical problem by going on line:
"This week, I bought a shiny new BlackBerry. This made me very happy. Then I went home and found that my new BlackBerry was inundating my in-box with copies of my sent e-mail messages. This made me very frustrated.
I headed back to the store, where a well-intentioned "specialist" took my phone, tweaked a few settings and said my e-mail messages would be duplicate-free. They weren't.
If you're like me, odds are that you've also found yourself with a tech problem that was made worse by the lack of ready, available - and perhaps most important - helpful help. But with the Internet, there's no need to pine for better support.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other users out there, sharing their experience and wisdom, often for free. So instead of getting on the phone, get online and start crowd-sourcing your tech support needs."
The proof is in....if it was ever needed!
That the Israeli government has allowed the building of settlements unabated is almost beyond question.
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem has now documented that one of the settlements is not only illegal according to international law, but actually built on land to which Palestinians have title.
"In March 2005, the government of Israel adopted the opinion it had commissioned from Attorney Talia Sasson, former head of the Special Tasks Department in the State Attorney's Office, regarding unauthorized outposts. In doing so, it set, for the first time, detailed criteria for examining the legality of Israeli communities in the West Bank according to local law.
All the settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international humanitarian law, whether or not they are officially recognized by the Israeli government. The various governments of Israel ignored this prohibition and established more than 130 recognized settlements throughout the West Bank and on the territory it annexed to Jerusalem. The population of these settlements is now almost one-half million persons. Unlike previous reports, in this report B’Tselem examines whether Israel has, at the very least, met its declared commitment to respect the local law.
According to the Sasson report, to be legal under local law, an Israeli settlement must meet each of the following four criteria:
the Israeli government issued a decision to establish the settlement;
the settlement has a defined jurisdictional area;
the settlement has a detailed, approved outline plan;
the settlement lies on state land or on land that was purchased by Israelis and registered under their name in the Land Registry.
According to B'Tselem’s research, Ofra meets only the first of these conditions: in 1979, four years after its establishment, the government declared it an official community. However, no jurisdictional area has ever been defined for Ofra, no detailed outline plan has been approved for the settlement, and no lawful building permits were ever issued for it. Thus, the entire community of Ofra, with its hundreds of residential units, was built unlawfully.
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem has now documented that one of the settlements is not only illegal according to international law, but actually built on land to which Palestinians have title.
"In March 2005, the government of Israel adopted the opinion it had commissioned from Attorney Talia Sasson, former head of the Special Tasks Department in the State Attorney's Office, regarding unauthorized outposts. In doing so, it set, for the first time, detailed criteria for examining the legality of Israeli communities in the West Bank according to local law.
All the settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international humanitarian law, whether or not they are officially recognized by the Israeli government. The various governments of Israel ignored this prohibition and established more than 130 recognized settlements throughout the West Bank and on the territory it annexed to Jerusalem. The population of these settlements is now almost one-half million persons. Unlike previous reports, in this report B’Tselem examines whether Israel has, at the very least, met its declared commitment to respect the local law.
According to the Sasson report, to be legal under local law, an Israeli settlement must meet each of the following four criteria:
the Israeli government issued a decision to establish the settlement;
the settlement has a defined jurisdictional area;
the settlement has a detailed, approved outline plan;
the settlement lies on state land or on land that was purchased by Israelis and registered under their name in the Land Registry.
According to B'Tselem’s research, Ofra meets only the first of these conditions: in 1979, four years after its establishment, the government declared it an official community. However, no jurisdictional area has ever been defined for Ofra, no detailed outline plan has been approved for the settlement, and no lawful building permits were ever issued for it. Thus, the entire community of Ofra, with its hundreds of residential units, was built unlawfully.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
On the Road.....
With the New Year and vacation-time MPS goes "walk-about" - or at least jetting around a bit for the next little while.
Stay tuned as MPS will continue notwithstanding "reporting" from different parts of the world.
Stay tuned as MPS will continue notwithstanding "reporting" from different parts of the world.
Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration
Scott Horton, lawyer, writing in Harper's Magazine on what many will doubtlessly see as unpalatable, but necessary nevertheless:
"Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.
This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.
No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former president or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, and even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the administration’s activities would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than our own. But that only means choices must be made. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration’s transgressions against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is torture."
Continue reading here.
"Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.
This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted “signing statements” that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.
No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless. Yet it is no simple matter to prosecute a former president or his senior officers. There is no precedent for such a prosecution, and even if there was, the very breadth and audacity of the administration’s activities would make the process so complex as to defy systems of justice far less fragmented than our own. But that only means choices must be made. Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration’s transgressions against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is torture."
Continue reading here.
Blog censorship silences free speech around the world
Blogs are not liked, or accepted, everywhere....
WorldFocus [well worth accessing regularly] reports:
"Internet censorship and surveillance are contentious issues around the world.
In Malaysia, blogging remains one of the few ways to exercise free speech, although the government has begun to crack down on sites and bloggers, blocking malaysia-today.net (since redirected) and jailing its publisher.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad joins his country’s bloggers in criticizing the government under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, his chosen successor.
The EU recently criticized Turkey for its free speech violations, when the government blocked 850 sites, including Blogger and YouTube. The blockage of wordpress.com last August met a firestorm of criticism, as documented by “Global Voices” blogger Sami Ben Gharbia.
Australia is making headlines for its new Internet censorship legislation, which is being criticized by both bloggers and traditional journalists. Blogger “Stilgherrian” leads a discussion about the new laws that includes a direct reply from a member of Parliament defending the laws.]
Egypt faces its own free speech struggles, as explored by a Worldfocus signature story and an interview with blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy, who claims that online free speech rights are severely limited by the government. He also started a debate at Flickr, where he feels his photos of Egyptian political demonstrations have been censored.
Bi Yantao of the “Fool’s Mountain” blog reports that China – perhaps the country most famous for Internet censorship and its “great firewall” — tightened its Internet censorship as the Beijing Olympics finished and foreigners left.
Fred Stopsky of “The Impudent Observor” shares a Finnish report stating that older Finns accept Internet censorship to prevent the spread of violence and “certain ideas.”
British blogger “Charlotte Gore” responds to member of Parliament Hazel Blears’ attack on political bloggers by insisting that “the blogosphere does not answer to the government.”
“DailyBits” provides a succinct top-ten rundown of Internet censorship, and the OpenNet Initiative provides in-depth tracking and analysis of Internet filtration and censorship around the globe."
WorldFocus [well worth accessing regularly] reports:
"Internet censorship and surveillance are contentious issues around the world.
In Malaysia, blogging remains one of the few ways to exercise free speech, although the government has begun to crack down on sites and bloggers, blocking malaysia-today.net (since redirected) and jailing its publisher.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad joins his country’s bloggers in criticizing the government under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, his chosen successor.
The EU recently criticized Turkey for its free speech violations, when the government blocked 850 sites, including Blogger and YouTube. The blockage of wordpress.com last August met a firestorm of criticism, as documented by “Global Voices” blogger Sami Ben Gharbia.
Australia is making headlines for its new Internet censorship legislation, which is being criticized by both bloggers and traditional journalists. Blogger “Stilgherrian” leads a discussion about the new laws that includes a direct reply from a member of Parliament defending the laws.]
Egypt faces its own free speech struggles, as explored by a Worldfocus signature story and an interview with blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy, who claims that online free speech rights are severely limited by the government. He also started a debate at Flickr, where he feels his photos of Egyptian political demonstrations have been censored.
Bi Yantao of the “Fool’s Mountain” blog reports that China – perhaps the country most famous for Internet censorship and its “great firewall” — tightened its Internet censorship as the Beijing Olympics finished and foreigners left.
Fred Stopsky of “The Impudent Observor” shares a Finnish report stating that older Finns accept Internet censorship to prevent the spread of violence and “certain ideas.”
British blogger “Charlotte Gore” responds to member of Parliament Hazel Blears’ attack on political bloggers by insisting that “the blogosphere does not answer to the government.”
“DailyBits” provides a succinct top-ten rundown of Internet censorship, and the OpenNet Initiative provides in-depth tracking and analysis of Internet filtration and censorship around the globe."
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Down to scavenging
Devastating is the only word to describe the appalling living conditions the people of Zimbabwe endure. Despite President Mugabe - dictator personified - meting out every sort of travail to his people one can imagine, the world makes some noises and tut-tuts......but no action of any sort. Saddam was criticised by the West for the way he treated his people. It was said to be one of the justifications for invading Iraq to "free" the Iraqis from Saddam's tryanny.
Could it be that because Zimbabwe has no oil or minerals of value to the West that there is no interest in doing something about the plight of the people of Zimbabwe?
The NY Times reports on how desperate things have become when the populace has to resort to scavenging to survive:
"Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.
But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.
The survey conducted by the United Nations World Food Program in October found a shocking deterioration in the past year alone. The survey, recently provided to international donors, found that the proportion of people who had eaten nothing the previous day had risen to 12 percent from zero, while those who had consumed only one meal had soared to 60 percent from only 13 percent last year.
For almost three months, from June to August, Mr. Mugabe banned international charitable organizations from operating, depriving more than a million people of food and basic aid after the country had already suffered one of its worst harvests.
Could it be that because Zimbabwe has no oil or minerals of value to the West that there is no interest in doing something about the plight of the people of Zimbabwe?
The NY Times reports on how desperate things have become when the populace has to resort to scavenging to survive:
"Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.
But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.
The survey conducted by the United Nations World Food Program in October found a shocking deterioration in the past year alone. The survey, recently provided to international donors, found that the proportion of people who had eaten nothing the previous day had risen to 12 percent from zero, while those who had consumed only one meal had soared to 60 percent from only 13 percent last year.
For almost three months, from June to August, Mr. Mugabe banned international charitable organizations from operating, depriving more than a million people of food and basic aid after the country had already suffered one of its worst harvests.
Spiralling towards a human disaster
When will the world wake up to the intolerable and inhumane treatment the Israelis are inflicting on the people of Gaza.
Sara Roy teaches at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Writing in the London Review of Books she details the extent of the blockade of Gaza by Israel and the devastating effect on the Gazans:
"The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.
How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next."
Over at The Guardian:
"Israel's blockade of Gaza is pushing the territory to the brink of collapse and fuelling the growth of a black money market controlled by Hamas, the World Bank warned yesterday."
And a blunt warning in a Comment is Free piece in The Guardian Seth Freedman writes under the headline "Remove the blinkers and see the truth" about what the Israelis are "doing" to the Palestinians:
"Although I am a relative newcomer to Israel's Mediterranean shores, the amount of exposure I have had during my four-year sojourn in the Holy Land to the daily humiliation and oppression being meted out to the Palestinians is more than most armchair critics will see in a lifetime. I should know – I was one of them myself for my first 24 years on the planet, and am all too aware how easy it is to be duped by second- or third-hand reporting from the front lines, whether through the media or via friends and family giving their skewed take from inside Israel's borders."
Sara Roy teaches at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Writing in the London Review of Books she details the extent of the blockade of Gaza by Israel and the devastating effect on the Gazans:
"The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.
How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next."
Over at The Guardian:
"Israel's blockade of Gaza is pushing the territory to the brink of collapse and fuelling the growth of a black money market controlled by Hamas, the World Bank warned yesterday."
And a blunt warning in a Comment is Free piece in The Guardian Seth Freedman writes under the headline "Remove the blinkers and see the truth" about what the Israelis are "doing" to the Palestinians:
"Although I am a relative newcomer to Israel's Mediterranean shores, the amount of exposure I have had during my four-year sojourn in the Holy Land to the daily humiliation and oppression being meted out to the Palestinians is more than most armchair critics will see in a lifetime. I should know – I was one of them myself for my first 24 years on the planet, and am all too aware how easy it is to be duped by second- or third-hand reporting from the front lines, whether through the media or via friends and family giving their skewed take from inside Israel's borders."
Bush White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfir
In a piece in the NY Times with the general heading of "The Reckoning" much of the financial meltdown in the US is sheeted home to the Bush Administration, and George W in particular:
"Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.
There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.
But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.
From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.
He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards."
"Eight years after arriving in Washington vowing to spread the dream of homeownership, Mr. Bush is leaving office, as he himself said recently, “faced with the prospect of a global meltdown” with roots in the housing sector he so ardently championed.
There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.
But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.
From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.
He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards."
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wishful thinking for 2009
People fall into two camps about veteran journalist, commentator, author and film-maker John Pilger - they either love or hate him. Whatever.....Pilger is a renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."
Pilger's latest piece for the New Statesman has all what Pilger sees as the good news for the new year:
January: Tony Blair is arrested at Heathrow Airport as he returns from yet another foreign speaking engagement (receipts since leaving office: £12m). He is flown to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes for his part in the illegal, unprovoked attack on a defenceless country, Iraq, justified by proven lies, and for the subsequent physical, social and cultural destruction of that country, causing the death of up to a million people. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, this is the "paramount war crime". The prosecution tells Blair's defence team it will not accept a plea of "sincerely believing". Cherie Blair, a close collaborator who has compared her husband with Winston Churchill, is cautioned.
February: Following the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, his predecessor, George W Bush, is arrested leaving the Church of the Holy Crusader in his home town of Crawford, Texas. He is flown to The Hague in War Criminal One. (See above for prosecution details.) Laura Bush, after a plea bargain, agrees to give evidence against the former president, "for God's sake".
March: Former vice-president Dick Cheney shoots himself in the foot hunting squirrels following a prayer breakfast in Hope, Florida.
April: Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest and assumes her rightful place as the democratic head of the government of Burma.
May: All American and British troops leave Iraq, including the "300-400" British troops who are to stay behind to "train Iraqis" and do the kind of special forces dirty work almost never reported by embedded journalists.
June: All Nato troops leave Afghanistan.
July: The British government calls a halt to selling arms and military equipment to ten out of 14 conflict-hit countries in Africa. The chairman of the arms company BAE Systems is arrested by the Serious Fraud Office.
August: The British Department for International Development ends its support for privatisation as a condition of aid to the poorest countries.
September: Sir Bob Geldof and Bono visit Tony Blair in prison, suggesting a worldwide Crime Aid gig to raise money for their hero's defence.
October: The Booker prizewinner Anne Enright apologises to Gerry and Kate McCann, parents of the missing child Madeleine McCann, for speculating in the London Review of Books about the possible involvement of the McCanns in the disappearance of their daughter.
November: Gordon Brown is kidnapped, hooded and forced to listen repeatedly to his 2007 speech to bankers at a Mansion House banquet: "What you as the City of London have achieved for financial services, we as a government now aspire to achieve for the whole economy."
December: Tony Blair is sentenced to life imprisonment and beatified by the Pope.
If you think none of this will happen, you are probably right. But beware 2010 . . .
Pilger's latest piece for the New Statesman has all what Pilger sees as the good news for the new year:
January: Tony Blair is arrested at Heathrow Airport as he returns from yet another foreign speaking engagement (receipts since leaving office: £12m). He is flown to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes for his part in the illegal, unprovoked attack on a defenceless country, Iraq, justified by proven lies, and for the subsequent physical, social and cultural destruction of that country, causing the death of up to a million people. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, this is the "paramount war crime". The prosecution tells Blair's defence team it will not accept a plea of "sincerely believing". Cherie Blair, a close collaborator who has compared her husband with Winston Churchill, is cautioned.
February: Following the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, his predecessor, George W Bush, is arrested leaving the Church of the Holy Crusader in his home town of Crawford, Texas. He is flown to The Hague in War Criminal One. (See above for prosecution details.) Laura Bush, after a plea bargain, agrees to give evidence against the former president, "for God's sake".
March: Former vice-president Dick Cheney shoots himself in the foot hunting squirrels following a prayer breakfast in Hope, Florida.
April: Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest and assumes her rightful place as the democratic head of the government of Burma.
May: All American and British troops leave Iraq, including the "300-400" British troops who are to stay behind to "train Iraqis" and do the kind of special forces dirty work almost never reported by embedded journalists.
June: All Nato troops leave Afghanistan.
July: The British government calls a halt to selling arms and military equipment to ten out of 14 conflict-hit countries in Africa. The chairman of the arms company BAE Systems is arrested by the Serious Fraud Office.
August: The British Department for International Development ends its support for privatisation as a condition of aid to the poorest countries.
September: Sir Bob Geldof and Bono visit Tony Blair in prison, suggesting a worldwide Crime Aid gig to raise money for their hero's defence.
October: The Booker prizewinner Anne Enright apologises to Gerry and Kate McCann, parents of the missing child Madeleine McCann, for speculating in the London Review of Books about the possible involvement of the McCanns in the disappearance of their daughter.
November: Gordon Brown is kidnapped, hooded and forced to listen repeatedly to his 2007 speech to bankers at a Mansion House banquet: "What you as the City of London have achieved for financial services, we as a government now aspire to achieve for the whole economy."
December: Tony Blair is sentenced to life imprisonment and beatified by the Pope.
If you think none of this will happen, you are probably right. But beware 2010 . . .
They lied about Iraq in 2003, and they're still lying now
It doesn't get more hard-hitting than this op-ed piece by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent:
"Triumphalists are getting off on Iraq again, intoning hallelujah songs as they did after staging the fall of Saddam's statue then again and again, sweet lullabies to send us into blissful sleep and wake to a new dawn. The composers and orchestrators – Blair, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Straw, Hoon and Rice – still believe history is on their side.
Bush visited his troops at Camp Victory in Iraq this month and said: "Iraq had a record of supporting terror, of developing and using weapons of mass destruction, was routinely firing at American military personnel, systematically violating UN resolutions ... Iraqis, once afraid to leave their homes are going back to school and shopping in malls ... American troops are returning home because of success." Only one shoe and one without a sharp stiletto was hurled at him by Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi who begged to differ.
Gordon Brown, also in Iraq, spun his own fairy tale of Baghdad, where everyone is living happily ever after and British soldiers come home proud heroes. The reality is that some of our soldiers are broken – physically and mentally – fighting this illegal and unpopular war and that too many did terrible things in the land of endless tears. General Sir Mike Jackson now blames the Americans for their "appalling" decisions. And yet he too insists the campaign was a success."
And:
"I have words, too weak and inadequate to carry the rage felt by millions at the renewed arrogance of the villains who first devastated Iraq and now garland themselves. Lies, lies and now delusion. There is no glory to be salvaged in this desert."
"Triumphalists are getting off on Iraq again, intoning hallelujah songs as they did after staging the fall of Saddam's statue then again and again, sweet lullabies to send us into blissful sleep and wake to a new dawn. The composers and orchestrators – Blair, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Straw, Hoon and Rice – still believe history is on their side.
Bush visited his troops at Camp Victory in Iraq this month and said: "Iraq had a record of supporting terror, of developing and using weapons of mass destruction, was routinely firing at American military personnel, systematically violating UN resolutions ... Iraqis, once afraid to leave their homes are going back to school and shopping in malls ... American troops are returning home because of success." Only one shoe and one without a sharp stiletto was hurled at him by Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi who begged to differ.
Gordon Brown, also in Iraq, spun his own fairy tale of Baghdad, where everyone is living happily ever after and British soldiers come home proud heroes. The reality is that some of our soldiers are broken – physically and mentally – fighting this illegal and unpopular war and that too many did terrible things in the land of endless tears. General Sir Mike Jackson now blames the Americans for their "appalling" decisions. And yet he too insists the campaign was a success."
And:
"I have words, too weak and inadequate to carry the rage felt by millions at the renewed arrogance of the villains who first devastated Iraq and now garland themselves. Lies, lies and now delusion. There is no glory to be salvaged in this desert."
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”
James Fallows, resident in China, reports and writes for the Atlantic Monthly.
His latest article is not only illuminating but worth reading - and understanding the "message" loud and clear.
"In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice:
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”.
As for Xiqing?:
"Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm. His office, in one of the more tasteful new glass-walled high-rises in Beijing, itself seems less Chinese than internationally “fusion”-minded in its aesthetic and furnishings. Bonsai trees in large pots, elegant Japanese-looking arrangements of individual smooth stones on display shelves, Chinese and Western financial textbooks behind the desk, with a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. perched among the books. Two very large, very thin desktop monitors read out financial data from around the world. As we spoke, Western classical music played softly from a good sound system.
Gao dressed and acted like a Silicon Valley moneyman rather than one from Wall Street—open-necked tattersall shirt, muted plaid jacket, dark slacks, scuffed walking shoes. Rimless glasses. His father was a Red Army officer who was on the Long March with Mao. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Gao worked on a railroad-building gang and in an ammunition factory. He is 55, fit-looking, with crew-cut hair and a jokey demeanor rather than an air of sternness."
His latest article is not only illuminating but worth reading - and understanding the "message" loud and clear.
"In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice:
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”.
As for Xiqing?:
"Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm. His office, in one of the more tasteful new glass-walled high-rises in Beijing, itself seems less Chinese than internationally “fusion”-minded in its aesthetic and furnishings. Bonsai trees in large pots, elegant Japanese-looking arrangements of individual smooth stones on display shelves, Chinese and Western financial textbooks behind the desk, with a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. perched among the books. Two very large, very thin desktop monitors read out financial data from around the world. As we spoke, Western classical music played softly from a good sound system.
Gao dressed and acted like a Silicon Valley moneyman rather than one from Wall Street—open-necked tattersall shirt, muted plaid jacket, dark slacks, scuffed walking shoes. Rimless glasses. His father was a Red Army officer who was on the Long March with Mao. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Gao worked on a railroad-building gang and in an ammunition factory. He is 55, fit-looking, with crew-cut hair and a jokey demeanor rather than an air of sternness."
Monday, December 22, 2008
Excess beyong comprehension.....or fair or reasonable
Doubtlessly the bankers will say they are being made scapegoats for all the financial woes inflicting much of the world. Bankers and financial people have certainly seen to lining their own pockets, excessively, and spend money on "things" totally beyond fairness or even simple decency - let alone any consideration for a fiduciary duty to their shareholders or investors.
The SMH republishes an AP report on the sort of salaries, bonuses and perks which were being paid:
"Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $US1.6 billion ($2.34 billion) in salaries, bonuses and other benefits last year, an AP analysis reveals.
The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.
Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.
The total amount given to nearly 600 executives would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines.
Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee and a longstanding critic of executive largesse, said the bonuses tallied by the AP review amount to a bribe "to get them to do the jobs for which they are well paid in the first place.
"Most of us sign on to do jobs and we do them best we can," said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. "We're told that some of the most highly paid people in executive positions are different. They need extra money to be motivated!"
The AP compiled total compensation based on annual reports that the banks file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 116 banks have so far received $US188 billion ($275.42 billion) in taxpayer help."
Continue reading, here, to see the sort of largess which was going around. Astounding!
The SMH republishes an AP report on the sort of salaries, bonuses and perks which were being paid:
"Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $US1.6 billion ($2.34 billion) in salaries, bonuses and other benefits last year, an AP analysis reveals.
The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.
Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.
The total amount given to nearly 600 executives would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines.
Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee and a longstanding critic of executive largesse, said the bonuses tallied by the AP review amount to a bribe "to get them to do the jobs for which they are well paid in the first place.
"Most of us sign on to do jobs and we do them best we can," said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. "We're told that some of the most highly paid people in executive positions are different. They need extra money to be motivated!"
The AP compiled total compensation based on annual reports that the banks file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 116 banks have so far received $US188 billion ($275.42 billion) in taxpayer help."
Continue reading, here, to see the sort of largess which was going around. Astounding!
China: Going into reverse in relation to the web
Who can forget all the hooha around the time of the recent Beijing Olympics about the degree of censorship the Chinese Government would exercise over the web.
Things improved a bit - no doubt as a result of the pressure brought to bear on the government and the poor PR "look" - but it seems that the Chinese have now taken a giant step backwards.
Apart from reports in the last days that the NY Times has been blocked in China, Reporters Without Borders reports in "Government goes into reverse, blocking access to foreign websites" again:
"Reporters Without Borders condemns the Chinese government’s censorship of the websites of certain foreign news media such as Voice of America and the BBC and certain Chinese media based outside mainland China, which have been rendered inaccessible inside China since the start of December.
“Freedom of information is widely violated in China,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Right now, the authorities are gradually rolling back all the progress made in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic games, when even foreign websites in Mandarin were made accessible. The pretence of liberalisation is now over. The blocking of access to the websites of foreign news media speaks volumes about the government’s intolerance. We urge the authorities to unblock them again.”
According to the online magazine China Digital Times, the Asiaweek (http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/main.cfm) and Mingpao (http://www.mingpao.com/) websites have been inaccessible since 2 December. The Hong Kong (http://www.hk.youtube.com) and Taiwanese (http://www.tw.youtube.com) versions of the video-sharing website YouTube are also inaccessible.
Access to the BBC’s website is also restricted. According to the BBC’s technical service, web traffic has also suddenly fallen off."
Things improved a bit - no doubt as a result of the pressure brought to bear on the government and the poor PR "look" - but it seems that the Chinese have now taken a giant step backwards.
Apart from reports in the last days that the NY Times has been blocked in China, Reporters Without Borders reports in "Government goes into reverse, blocking access to foreign websites" again:
"Reporters Without Borders condemns the Chinese government’s censorship of the websites of certain foreign news media such as Voice of America and the BBC and certain Chinese media based outside mainland China, which have been rendered inaccessible inside China since the start of December.
“Freedom of information is widely violated in China,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Right now, the authorities are gradually rolling back all the progress made in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic games, when even foreign websites in Mandarin were made accessible. The pretence of liberalisation is now over. The blocking of access to the websites of foreign news media speaks volumes about the government’s intolerance. We urge the authorities to unblock them again.”
According to the online magazine China Digital Times, the Asiaweek (http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/main.cfm) and Mingpao (http://www.mingpao.com/) websites have been inaccessible since 2 December. The Hong Kong (http://www.hk.youtube.com) and Taiwanese (http://www.tw.youtube.com) versions of the video-sharing website YouTube are also inaccessible.
Access to the BBC’s website is also restricted. According to the BBC’s technical service, web traffic has also suddenly fallen off."
One man, the UN, Israel and an Expulsion
It must be some sort of policy that Israel has put in place to increasingly be seen as some sort of rogue State.
Criticise Israel, even if you are the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Jewish and a professor from Princeton University - and you will still get turned back at the airport in Israel and expelled from the country.
What arrogance and conceit that Israel can simply do what it wants no matter what!
Professor Falk writes of his experience in a piece in The Guardian - none to pleasant - at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel:
"On December 14, I arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel to carry out my UN role as special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories.
I was leading a mission that had intended to visit the West Bank and Gaza to prepare a report on Israel's compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. Meetings had been scheduled on an hourly basis during the six days, starting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the following day.
I knew that there might be problems at the airport. Israel had strongly opposed my appointment a few months earlier and its foreign ministry had issued a statement that it would bar my entry if I came to Israel in my capacity as a UN representative.
At the same time, I would not have made the long journey from California, where I live, had I not been reasonably optimistic about my chances of getting in. Israel was informed that I would lead the mission and given a copy of my itinerary, and issued visas to the two people assisting me: a staff security person and an assistant, both of whom work at the office of the high commissioner of human rights in Geneva.
To avoid an incident at the airport, Israel could have either refused to grant visas or communicated to the UN that I would not be allowed to enter, but neither step was taken. It seemed that Israel wanted to teach me, and more significantly, the UN a lesson: there will be no cooperation with those who make strong criticisms of Israel's occupation policy."
Keep reading here.
Criticise Israel, even if you are the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Jewish and a professor from Princeton University - and you will still get turned back at the airport in Israel and expelled from the country.
What arrogance and conceit that Israel can simply do what it wants no matter what!
Professor Falk writes of his experience in a piece in The Guardian - none to pleasant - at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel:
"On December 14, I arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel to carry out my UN role as special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories.
I was leading a mission that had intended to visit the West Bank and Gaza to prepare a report on Israel's compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. Meetings had been scheduled on an hourly basis during the six days, starting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the following day.
I knew that there might be problems at the airport. Israel had strongly opposed my appointment a few months earlier and its foreign ministry had issued a statement that it would bar my entry if I came to Israel in my capacity as a UN representative.
At the same time, I would not have made the long journey from California, where I live, had I not been reasonably optimistic about my chances of getting in. Israel was informed that I would lead the mission and given a copy of my itinerary, and issued visas to the two people assisting me: a staff security person and an assistant, both of whom work at the office of the high commissioner of human rights in Geneva.
To avoid an incident at the airport, Israel could have either refused to grant visas or communicated to the UN that I would not be allowed to enter, but neither step was taken. It seemed that Israel wanted to teach me, and more significantly, the UN a lesson: there will be no cooperation with those who make strong criticisms of Israel's occupation policy."
Keep reading here.
Some woman. Some following and clout
Arianna Huffington is well known on the political scene in the US.
Having started a blog, her site Huffington Post, has had more than 8 million unique visitors in October, according to Nielsen.
The LA Times had a Q & A her. Some examples:
"Americans already seem confused with newspapers on the difference between their nonpartisan news pages and the opinion pages.
I don't think Americans are confused. I don't get that sense at all. I think the mainstream media, the traditional media, are increasingly accepting that there's nothing wrong with opinion-based journalism if it is also fact-based at the same time.
Now that the Bush administration is closing up shop, do you think that the hatred of the media that they've inflamed will finally cool?
I don't really think it's the Bush administration that's fueled the hatred of the media. I think it was the media's complicity in the lead-up to the war in Iraq that has been one of the darkest moments of American media -- and that helped fuel a lot of the dissatisfaction with the traditional media."
Having started a blog, her site Huffington Post, has had more than 8 million unique visitors in October, according to Nielsen.
The LA Times had a Q & A her. Some examples:
"Americans already seem confused with newspapers on the difference between their nonpartisan news pages and the opinion pages.
I don't think Americans are confused. I don't get that sense at all. I think the mainstream media, the traditional media, are increasingly accepting that there's nothing wrong with opinion-based journalism if it is also fact-based at the same time.
Now that the Bush administration is closing up shop, do you think that the hatred of the media that they've inflamed will finally cool?
I don't really think it's the Bush administration that's fueled the hatred of the media. I think it was the media's complicity in the lead-up to the war in Iraq that has been one of the darkest moments of American media -- and that helped fuel a lot of the dissatisfaction with the traditional media."
Sunday, December 21, 2008
If criminal penalties are removed, what will deter lawbreaking by political officials?
The question of whether Bush & Co. [Cheney, et al] ought to be pursued for multiple breaches of the law - think wire-tapping, unlawful detention, renditioning , Gitmo, torture and waterboarding to name but a few - is underway in the US. It is unlikely that they will be prosecuted. Justice and humanity demands that they ought to be by any yardstick.
Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon under the headline "If criminal penalties are removed, what will deter lawbreaking by political officials?" reflects on the Nuremberg Trials and what we should have learnt from them:
"The opening address of Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials is undoubtedly one of the most important speeches of the last century. It established the basic precepts of Western Justice. War crimes, Jackson observed, are such that "civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated." And, contrary to the blatantly self-contradictory claims from today's Washington elite, he pointed out that the only way to ensure they don't happen again is through real accountability and punishment:
'The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power . . . .'
It's irrelevant whether crimes rise to that same level or are of the same magnitude. These were principles of justice that were supposed to endure and govern how we conducted ourselves generally, beyond that specific case. In fact, Justice Louis Brandeis, 20 years earlier, observed that it's probably more important -- not less -- to enforce the rule of law when government leaders commit crimes than when ordinary Americans commit them:
'In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.'
We haven't just forgotten these principles. We're deliberately -- consciously -- choosing to renounce them."
Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon under the headline "If criminal penalties are removed, what will deter lawbreaking by political officials?" reflects on the Nuremberg Trials and what we should have learnt from them:
"The opening address of Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg Trials is undoubtedly one of the most important speeches of the last century. It established the basic precepts of Western Justice. War crimes, Jackson observed, are such that "civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated." And, contrary to the blatantly self-contradictory claims from today's Washington elite, he pointed out that the only way to ensure they don't happen again is through real accountability and punishment:
'The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power . . . .'
It's irrelevant whether crimes rise to that same level or are of the same magnitude. These were principles of justice that were supposed to endure and govern how we conducted ourselves generally, beyond that specific case. In fact, Justice Louis Brandeis, 20 years earlier, observed that it's probably more important -- not less -- to enforce the rule of law when government leaders commit crimes than when ordinary Americans commit them:
'In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.'
We haven't just forgotten these principles. We're deliberately -- consciously -- choosing to renounce them."
Robert Fisk’s World: One missing word sowed the seeds of catastrophe
Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent highlights the ongoing unresolved conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians:
"A nit-picker this week. And given the fact that we're all remembering human rights, the Palestinians come to mind since they have precious few of them, and the Israelis because they have the luxury of a lot of them.
And Lord Blair, since he'll be communing with God next week, might also reflect that he still – to his shame – hasn't visited Gaza. But the nit-picking has got to be our old friend United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. This, you'll recall, was supposed to be the resolution that would guide all future peace efforts in the Middle East; Oslo was supposed to have been founded on it and all sorts of other processes and summits and road maps.
It was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasises "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict".
Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories – because the word "all" is missing and since the definite article "the" is missing before the word "territories", its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps."
Continue reading here.
"A nit-picker this week. And given the fact that we're all remembering human rights, the Palestinians come to mind since they have precious few of them, and the Israelis because they have the luxury of a lot of them.
And Lord Blair, since he'll be communing with God next week, might also reflect that he still – to his shame – hasn't visited Gaza. But the nit-picking has got to be our old friend United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. This, you'll recall, was supposed to be the resolution that would guide all future peace efforts in the Middle East; Oslo was supposed to have been founded on it and all sorts of other processes and summits and road maps.
It was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasises "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict".
Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories – because the word "all" is missing and since the definite article "the" is missing before the word "territories", its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps."
Continue reading here.
Guns, Butter & Obama
It goes without saying that on assuming office Obama will be pulled this way and that. He will have his hands full as they say!
FPIF [Foreign Policy in Focus] details one area from which pressure will be sought to be brought on the new President:
"Over the next several months there will be a battle for hearts and minds, but not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The war will be here at home, waged mostly in the halls of Congress, where grim lobbyists for one of the top 15 economies in the world are digging in to preserve their stake in the massive U.S. military budget. With the country in deep recession and resources dwindling for the new administration's programs on health care, education, and the environment, the outcome of this battle may well end up defining the next four years.
But coming to grips with the issue, as one military analyst noted, is likely to resemble the worst of World War I trench warfare. "It will be like the British Army at the Somme," Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information (CDI) told the Boston Globe, "you will just get mowed down by the defense industry."
Up Against the Industry
For starters, there are 185,000 corporations behind those metaphorical machine guns, and a few are formidable indeed: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Alliant Techsystems, United Technologies, Textron, Teledyne, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Texas Instruments, just to name a few.
The World Policy Institute found that dozens of high Bush administration officials were former arms company executives, consultants, or shareholders, and that this network of influence reaches deep into Congress. The combination of lobbying and PAC money that pours into election coffers every two years gives the arms industry enormous influence over the actions of the executive and legislative branches.
The reason is simple: the money at stake is staggering, although nailing down exactly what this country spends on the military is extremely difficult. "Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable," defense expert Chalmers Johnson points out. "All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect."
While the "official" 2009 U.S. military budget is $516 billion, that figure bears little resemblance to what this country actually spends. According to CDI, if one pulls together all the various threads that make up the defense spending tapestry — including Home Security, secret "black budget" items, military-related programs outside of the Defense Department, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and such outlays as veterans' benefits — the figure is around $862 billion for the current fiscal year. Johnson says spending is closer to $1.1 trillion.
Even these figures are misleading, since it does not project future costs. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, when the economic and social costs of the Iraq War are finally added up — including decades of treatment for veterans disabled by traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder — the final bill could reach $5 trillion."
FPIF [Foreign Policy in Focus] details one area from which pressure will be sought to be brought on the new President:
"Over the next several months there will be a battle for hearts and minds, but not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The war will be here at home, waged mostly in the halls of Congress, where grim lobbyists for one of the top 15 economies in the world are digging in to preserve their stake in the massive U.S. military budget. With the country in deep recession and resources dwindling for the new administration's programs on health care, education, and the environment, the outcome of this battle may well end up defining the next four years.
But coming to grips with the issue, as one military analyst noted, is likely to resemble the worst of World War I trench warfare. "It will be like the British Army at the Somme," Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information (CDI) told the Boston Globe, "you will just get mowed down by the defense industry."
Up Against the Industry
For starters, there are 185,000 corporations behind those metaphorical machine guns, and a few are formidable indeed: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Alliant Techsystems, United Technologies, Textron, Teledyne, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Texas Instruments, just to name a few.
The World Policy Institute found that dozens of high Bush administration officials were former arms company executives, consultants, or shareholders, and that this network of influence reaches deep into Congress. The combination of lobbying and PAC money that pours into election coffers every two years gives the arms industry enormous influence over the actions of the executive and legislative branches.
The reason is simple: the money at stake is staggering, although nailing down exactly what this country spends on the military is extremely difficult. "Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable," defense expert Chalmers Johnson points out. "All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect."
While the "official" 2009 U.S. military budget is $516 billion, that figure bears little resemblance to what this country actually spends. According to CDI, if one pulls together all the various threads that make up the defense spending tapestry — including Home Security, secret "black budget" items, military-related programs outside of the Defense Department, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and such outlays as veterans' benefits — the figure is around $862 billion for the current fiscal year. Johnson says spending is closer to $1.1 trillion.
Even these figures are misleading, since it does not project future costs. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, when the economic and social costs of the Iraq War are finally added up — including decades of treatment for veterans disabled by traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder — the final bill could reach $5 trillion."
Saturday, December 20, 2008
"Deep Throat" dies
Anyone who lived through the years of the Nixon presidency and the whole Watergate scandal - including the revelations by the then unknown Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post of the Nixon machinations - will have known of "Deep Throat".
Perhaps one of those "funny" coincidences, but with the release of a the movie Frost / Nixon, it has been announced that "Deep Throat" has just died. The IHT reports:
"W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the FBI when he helped bring down President Richard Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died on Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, California.
His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.
In 2005, Felt revealed that he was the source who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.
The disclosure even surprised Woodward and his partner on the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein. They had kept their promise not to reveal his identity until after his death. Indeed, Woodward was so scrupulous about shielding Felt that he did not introduce him to Bernstein until this year, 36 years after they cracked the scandal."
Perhaps one of those "funny" coincidences, but with the release of a the movie Frost / Nixon, it has been announced that "Deep Throat" has just died. The IHT reports:
"W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the FBI when he helped bring down President Richard Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died on Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, California.
His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.
In 2005, Felt revealed that he was the source who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.
The disclosure even surprised Woodward and his partner on the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein. They had kept their promise not to reveal his identity until after his death. Indeed, Woodward was so scrupulous about shielding Felt that he did not introduce him to Bernstein until this year, 36 years after they cracked the scandal."
Iraq: No, the Americans are not really leaving!
It's all in the language, PR, politics and what you want to believe....
Are the Americans really on the way out of Iraq? Apparently not so, if this report from Inter Press Service is right:
"U.S. military leaders and Pentagon officials have made it clear through public statements and deliberately leaked stories in recent weeks that they plan to violate a central provision of the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement requiring the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 by reclassifying combat troops as support troops.
The scheme to engage in chicanery in labeling U.S. troops represents both open defiance of an agreement which the U.S. military has never accepted and a way of blocking President-elect Barack Obama's proposed plan for withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office.
A man holds his child as US soldiers walk past, during a routine patrol in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Fadhil, in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008.
(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)By redesignating tens of thousands of combat troops as support troops, those officials apparently hope to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to insist on getting all combat troops of the country by mid-2010.
Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of CENTCOM, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who opposed Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan during the election campaign, have drawn up their own alternative withdrawal plan rejecting that timeline, as the New York Times reported Thursday. That plan was communicated to Obama in general terms by Secretary of Defense Robert M.Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen when he met with his national security team in Chicago on Dec. 15, according to the Times.
The determination of the military leadership to ignore the U.S.-Iraq agreement and to pressure Obama on his withdrawal policy was clear from remarks made by Mullen in a news conference on Nov. 17 -- after U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker had signed the agreement in Baghdad."
Are the Americans really on the way out of Iraq? Apparently not so, if this report from Inter Press Service is right:
"U.S. military leaders and Pentagon officials have made it clear through public statements and deliberately leaked stories in recent weeks that they plan to violate a central provision of the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement requiring the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities by mid-2009 by reclassifying combat troops as support troops.
The scheme to engage in chicanery in labeling U.S. troops represents both open defiance of an agreement which the U.S. military has never accepted and a way of blocking President-elect Barack Obama's proposed plan for withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his taking office.
A man holds his child as US soldiers walk past, during a routine patrol in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Fadhil, in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008.
(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)By redesignating tens of thousands of combat troops as support troops, those officials apparently hope to make it difficult, if not impossible, for Obama to insist on getting all combat troops of the country by mid-2010.
Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of CENTCOM, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who opposed Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan during the election campaign, have drawn up their own alternative withdrawal plan rejecting that timeline, as the New York Times reported Thursday. That plan was communicated to Obama in general terms by Secretary of Defense Robert M.Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen when he met with his national security team in Chicago on Dec. 15, according to the Times.
The determination of the military leadership to ignore the U.S.-Iraq agreement and to pressure Obama on his withdrawal policy was clear from remarks made by Mullen in a news conference on Nov. 17 -- after U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker had signed the agreement in Baghdad."
At last?
There can be little doubt that the only way in which Israel might reign in the continued building and development of settlements in the West Bank or behaves at least humanely towards the Gazans, will be when the world stops ignoring what is happening in the occupied territories - now ongoing for 41 years - and brings pressure to bear on Israel.
Perhaps there is a small glimmer of light coming from the British. Haaretz reports:
"The British government is stepping up measures against settlements in the West Bank in an effort to stop their further expansion.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently instructed the Foreign Office to issue a warning to British citizens against the purchase of houses and real estate in the settlements.
Other measures recently imposed by London on West Bank settlements include tying the upgrade of relations between the European Union and Israel to the cessation of construction in the settlements in the West Bank and putting special labels on products denoting that they were made in West Bank settlements."
Perhaps there is a small glimmer of light coming from the British. Haaretz reports:
"The British government is stepping up measures against settlements in the West Bank in an effort to stop their further expansion.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently instructed the Foreign Office to issue a warning to British citizens against the purchase of houses and real estate in the settlements.
Other measures recently imposed by London on West Bank settlements include tying the upgrade of relations between the European Union and Israel to the cessation of construction in the settlements in the West Bank and putting special labels on products denoting that they were made in West Bank settlements."
Friday, December 19, 2008
The Great Unraveling
"The stranger, a Western businessman, slipped into the chair next to me at an Asia Society lunch here in Hong Kong and asked me a question that I can honestly say I've never been asked before: "So, just how corrupt is America?"
So begins one of Thomas Friedman's regular op-ed pieces in the NY Times - republished on IHT.
It is a reflective piece on how capitalism, and accompanying ethics, in the USA have gone awry.
"But while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors - Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined.
But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable. "The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme," said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.
The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don't just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don't want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism - but I don't want to be eaten by them either."
So begins one of Thomas Friedman's regular op-ed pieces in the NY Times - republished on IHT.
It is a reflective piece on how capitalism, and accompanying ethics, in the USA have gone awry.
"But while capitalism has saved China, the end of communism seems to have slightly unhinged America. We lost our two biggest ideological competitors - Beijing and Moscow. Everyone needs a competitor. It keeps you disciplined.
But once American capitalism no longer had to worry about communism, it seems to have gone crazy. Investment banks and hedge funds were leveraging themselves at crazy levels, paying themselves crazy salaries and, most of all, inventing financial instruments that completely disconnected the ultimate lenders from the original borrowers, and left no one accountable. "The collapse of communism pushed China to the center and [America] to the extreme," said Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.
The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don't just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don't want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism - but I don't want to be eaten by them either."
Cheney: Condemned out of his own mouth
Scott Horton, lawyer, writing on Harper's Magazine:
"Did Cheney Confess to a Felony? It looks that way to me. In an interview conducted with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl yesterday, Vice President Cheney was probed on his role in the Bush Administration’s torture program. His answers were in part extremely disingenuous, but he did acknowledge a key role in the decision to torture one prisoner. Here’s the key passage:
KARL: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
CHENEY: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.
KARL: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?
CHENEY: I don’t."
Horton rightly concludes:
"So Cheney confessed on television to a serious crime. It is now a crime committed in plain view. He is daring the public to take notice and do something about it. His remarks betray his disdain for the American justice system and of the new team preparing to take office in Washington. Cheney is convinced that in Washington power matters more than principle and law. That, Cheney supposes, is his legacy. And he may be right."
Read the complete piece, and see a video of an interview with a law professor on the Cheney "confession", here.
"Did Cheney Confess to a Felony? It looks that way to me. In an interview conducted with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl yesterday, Vice President Cheney was probed on his role in the Bush Administration’s torture program. His answers were in part extremely disingenuous, but he did acknowledge a key role in the decision to torture one prisoner. Here’s the key passage:
KARL: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
CHENEY: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.
KARL: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?
CHENEY: I don’t."
Horton rightly concludes:
"So Cheney confessed on television to a serious crime. It is now a crime committed in plain view. He is daring the public to take notice and do something about it. His remarks betray his disdain for the American justice system and of the new team preparing to take office in Washington. Cheney is convinced that in Washington power matters more than principle and law. That, Cheney supposes, is his legacy. And he may be right."
Read the complete piece, and see a video of an interview with a law professor on the Cheney "confession", here.
Robert Redforfd: Stand Up Against Bush's Giveaway of America's Redrock Wilderness
Is there no stopping the wanton vandalism of George W and his Administration, even he is in his dying days in office?
Robert Redford, writes on The Huffington Post:
"You can't put a price on silence or solitude. You can't quantify the beauty of wilderness. And yet that's not going to stop the Bush administration from trying to sell off what should be the birthright of future generations.
In three days, this Friday, 110,000 acres of majestic Utah wild lands go on the auction block, to be sold to the highest bidders in the oil and gas industry. It's a last-ditch effort by a corrupt administration to further enrich its friends in the dirty fuels business. If they succeed, they'll leave a wasteland behind them.
Never mind that we the People of the United States just rejected the failed energy policy of "drill, baby, drill!" Never mind that once industrialized, these precious lands will be marred for centuries. Ravaging these places will put cash in the pockets of greedy speculators, even if it won't solve our energy problems."
Continue reading here.
Robert Redford, writes on The Huffington Post:
"You can't put a price on silence or solitude. You can't quantify the beauty of wilderness. And yet that's not going to stop the Bush administration from trying to sell off what should be the birthright of future generations.
In three days, this Friday, 110,000 acres of majestic Utah wild lands go on the auction block, to be sold to the highest bidders in the oil and gas industry. It's a last-ditch effort by a corrupt administration to further enrich its friends in the dirty fuels business. If they succeed, they'll leave a wasteland behind them.
Never mind that we the People of the United States just rejected the failed energy policy of "drill, baby, drill!" Never mind that once industrialized, these precious lands will be marred for centuries. Ravaging these places will put cash in the pockets of greedy speculators, even if it won't solve our energy problems."
Continue reading here.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Can Obama avert an Arab-Israeli disaster?
"Time is running out for Israel and the Palestinians. Barack Obama is probably the last American president to have the option of pursuing an accord leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the so-called two-state solution."
So begins an op-ed piece by Bernd Debusmann, writing on Reuters.
In a most interesting piece well worth reading [in full, here] Bebusmann deals with what appears pessimism that any signs of a new approach to resolving the on-going issue is emerging from the Obama camp:
"While Obama has been critical of the hands-off approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the first seven years of the Bush administration, dismissing its efforts as “trips consisting of little more than photo-ops”, the president-elect has shown no sign that he might be willing to break with the decades-old policies that have earned the U.S. a reputation in the Arab world of backing Israel no matter what."
Interesting, too, is the seemingly growing position emanating from both Arabs and Israelis that a two-State solution may not be possible.
So begins an op-ed piece by Bernd Debusmann, writing on Reuters.
In a most interesting piece well worth reading [in full, here] Bebusmann deals with what appears pessimism that any signs of a new approach to resolving the on-going issue is emerging from the Obama camp:
"While Obama has been critical of the hands-off approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the first seven years of the Bush administration, dismissing its efforts as “trips consisting of little more than photo-ops”, the president-elect has shown no sign that he might be willing to break with the decades-old policies that have earned the U.S. a reputation in the Arab world of backing Israel no matter what."
Interesting, too, is the seemingly growing position emanating from both Arabs and Israelis that a two-State solution may not be possible.
Lots of money with great hardship and little gain
Here we have a global economic crisis - especially effecting the US - and today we read of the cost to the Americans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A staggering US$900 trillion.
CommonDreams reproduces a Reuters report:
"U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday.
In this March 31, 2008 file photo, an Iraqi family reacts as U.S. Army soldiers from K Troop, Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment detain their relative after a rocket propelled grenade attack on U.S. troops in Mosul, 360 kilometers (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo/FILE)A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict's $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.
With another $184 billion in spending for Afghanistan included, the two conflicts surpass the cost of the Vietnam War by about 50 percent, the report said.
CSBA said U.S. military operations have already reached $904 billion since 2001, including the two wars as well as stepped-up military security activities at home and the payout in war-related veterans' benefits. The estimate includes allocated spending into 2009.
In contrast, a separate Government Accountability Office study released on Monday said Congress has provided the Pentagon with $808 billion for the Bush administration's global war on terrorism from 2001 through September 30, 2008, including $508 billion for Iraq and $118 billion for Afghanistan, the Philippines and the Horn of Africa.
The CSBA study said U.S. taxpayers could pay another $416 billion to $817 billion over the next decade, even if the combined troop deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan were slashed to between 30,000 and 75,000.
That would bring the cost for both wars to between $1.3 trillion and $1.72 trillion for 2001 through 2018, and even higher when federal borrowing costs are included, CSBA said."
CommonDreams reproduces a Reuters report:
"U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday.
In this March 31, 2008 file photo, an Iraqi family reacts as U.S. Army soldiers from K Troop, Third Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment detain their relative after a rocket propelled grenade attack on U.S. troops in Mosul, 360 kilometers (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo/FILE)A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict's $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.
With another $184 billion in spending for Afghanistan included, the two conflicts surpass the cost of the Vietnam War by about 50 percent, the report said.
CSBA said U.S. military operations have already reached $904 billion since 2001, including the two wars as well as stepped-up military security activities at home and the payout in war-related veterans' benefits. The estimate includes allocated spending into 2009.
In contrast, a separate Government Accountability Office study released on Monday said Congress has provided the Pentagon with $808 billion for the Bush administration's global war on terrorism from 2001 through September 30, 2008, including $508 billion for Iraq and $118 billion for Afghanistan, the Philippines and the Horn of Africa.
The CSBA study said U.S. taxpayers could pay another $416 billion to $817 billion over the next decade, even if the combined troop deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan were slashed to between 30,000 and 75,000.
That would bring the cost for both wars to between $1.3 trillion and $1.72 trillion for 2001 through 2018, and even higher when federal borrowing costs are included, CSBA said."
Those shoes.....
Patrick Cockburn has been reporting from Iraq for many years. He is one of the few true journalists in the war-torn country. Interesting in all the hype surrounding the event - including the US seeking to make light of it - is the significance in the Arab world of the shoes being hurled, and even more particularly, what the reporter said at the time of the "throws".
He writes in The Independent:
"The sight of the Iraqi reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi hurling his shoes at President Bush at a press conference in Baghdad will gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious, useless, and almost invariably obsequious, events. "This is a farewell kiss," shouted Mr Zaidi. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."
Official press conferences of any kind seldom produce real news, but the worst are usually those given by foreign leaders on trips abroad in which they and their local ally suggest that they are in control of events and all is going according to plan.
One of the many infuriating, though also ludicrous, events in Iraq since the invasion of 2003 has been American and British leaders, arriving in secret at the enormous US base at Baghdad airport and travelling, accompanied by numerous armed guards, by helicopter to the heavily-fortified Green Zone. After a few hours there they would give upbeat press conferences, sitting alongside the Iraqi leader of the day, claiming significant improvements in security and chiding the assembled journalists for ignoring such clear signs of success."
Meanwhile, over at The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss writing in "Bush Finds WMDs in Iraq, Umm, or WMHs":
"President Bush finally found the long-missing Weapons of Mass Humiliation in Iraq. Iraqis, millions of them, are wearing them on their feet. Not exactly WMDs, but WMHs will have to do.
Unfortunately, Bush discovered the WMHs when a pair of them sailed past his head at a press conference in Baghdad. The hurler, Muntader al-Zaidi, is already a hero in Iraq, and beyond.
I hope I don't get in trouble with the Secret Service by saying that I, too, found satisfaction in the display of anger toward Bush, whose reckless war costs hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed an entire nation. What Zaidi did was to put an exclamation point on Bush's war, fittingly -- and, given the fact that the smoothly bipartisan, rancorless Barack Obama isn't likely to investigate the crimes of the Bush adminstration in Iraq, it might be all we get before Bush rides off into the Texas sunset."
He writes in The Independent:
"The sight of the Iraqi reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi hurling his shoes at President Bush at a press conference in Baghdad will gladden the heart of any journalist forced to attend these tedious, useless, and almost invariably obsequious, events. "This is a farewell kiss," shouted Mr Zaidi. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."
Official press conferences of any kind seldom produce real news, but the worst are usually those given by foreign leaders on trips abroad in which they and their local ally suggest that they are in control of events and all is going according to plan.
One of the many infuriating, though also ludicrous, events in Iraq since the invasion of 2003 has been American and British leaders, arriving in secret at the enormous US base at Baghdad airport and travelling, accompanied by numerous armed guards, by helicopter to the heavily-fortified Green Zone. After a few hours there they would give upbeat press conferences, sitting alongside the Iraqi leader of the day, claiming significant improvements in security and chiding the assembled journalists for ignoring such clear signs of success."
Meanwhile, over at The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss writing in "Bush Finds WMDs in Iraq, Umm, or WMHs":
"President Bush finally found the long-missing Weapons of Mass Humiliation in Iraq. Iraqis, millions of them, are wearing them on their feet. Not exactly WMDs, but WMHs will have to do.
Unfortunately, Bush discovered the WMHs when a pair of them sailed past his head at a press conference in Baghdad. The hurler, Muntader al-Zaidi, is already a hero in Iraq, and beyond.
I hope I don't get in trouble with the Secret Service by saying that I, too, found satisfaction in the display of anger toward Bush, whose reckless war costs hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed an entire nation. What Zaidi did was to put an exclamation point on Bush's war, fittingly -- and, given the fact that the smoothly bipartisan, rancorless Barack Obama isn't likely to investigate the crimes of the Bush adminstration in Iraq, it might be all we get before Bush rides off into the Texas sunset."
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Has the Arctic melt passed the point of no return?
Should we be surprised if the question, above, is answered in the affirmative?
The Independent reports:
"Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.
Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.
The Arctic is considered one of the most sensitive regions in terms of climate change and its transition to another climatic state will have a direct impact on other parts of the northern hemisphere, as well more indirect effects around the world.
Although researchers have documented a catastrophic loss of sea ice during the summer months over the past 20 years, they have not until now detected the definitive temperature signal that they could link with greenhouse-gas emissions.
However, in a study to be presented later today to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, scientists will show that Arctic amplification has been under way for the past five years, and it will continue to intensify Arctic warming for the foreseeable future."
The Independent reports:
"Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.
Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.
The Arctic is considered one of the most sensitive regions in terms of climate change and its transition to another climatic state will have a direct impact on other parts of the northern hemisphere, as well more indirect effects around the world.
Although researchers have documented a catastrophic loss of sea ice during the summer months over the past 20 years, they have not until now detected the definitive temperature signal that they could link with greenhouse-gas emissions.
However, in a study to be presented later today to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, scientists will show that Arctic amplification has been under way for the past five years, and it will continue to intensify Arctic warming for the foreseeable future."
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